[Sugar-devel] Karma IRC meeting - August 11

[NoiseEHC]

> Mmm, I'm not sure how realistic it is for people to be interested in 
> providing that kind of data... But I could be wrong.
>

When I was visiting my elementary school there was a biology teacher who 
took teaching biology very seriously. Computer technology was in its 
infancy at that time so he used an overhead projector and has drawn a 
lot of slides (plastic foils) with colored markers. It could have taken 
a LOT of time to draw all those materials and because copying plastic 
slides was (and probably is) very expensive he could not even share it 
with other teachers. What is clear to me that at least in his mind the 
materials were much higher quality than the books we used in class 
otherwise he would not have been working with them so much.
Now my feeling is that approximately 1% of the teachers can be like my 
biology teacher. Also approximately 5-10% of the teachers would spend 
5-10 minutes per day to fix learning materials (like fixing spelling, 
fixing examples kids did not understood in that day, etc). Even in small 
countries like Nepal this 1% can be more manpower you have in OLPC 
Nepal. Not using their helping potential is not too wise, I think that 
if you make contributing easy then people will start doing it.
Of course this is just my speculation.

> Having said that I certainly believe that such a feature would be 
> overkill at this point, there's a bunch of much higher priority tasks 
> that we need to tackle before and it's important not to lose focus of 
> our main goals.

Now that is what I agree with 100%. However at least planning for the 
future cannot be a waste of time (unless it takes more time than can be 
saved later). So probably the following two things would be enough 
preparation:
1. Do not use fancy lesson plans (like pdf or formatting) so creating 
some some wiki -> karma converter will be possible. Then you will be 
able to crowd source.
2. Do not wire questions/examples into the karma lesson. (It is mostly 
done because of internationalization issues.) It is only relevant for 
text only or mostly text only lessons because Karma is for programmers 
and the potential contributors will be teachers and nonprogrammer people 
cannot modify the code via a wiki I think that is obvious. They also 
will not be able to draw via a wiki.
I think that you should consider at least the 1. point since it is 
basically "do not do anything"... :)